After two days in Bukittingi around themarkets and watching the street life, our driver picked us up yesterday morningat our hotel and we departed on a scenic drive from the Highlands to Padang.

Our first encounter was the Ngarai Canyon.It looks like a popular picnic spot All through the hills are Japanese tunnels -you can visit, but we were heading towards Lake Maninjau and only at the startof our journey. We stopped for a couple of photos and then drove on further up intothe mountains and onto a plateau and Koto Gadang

. This is a really prettyvillage - well kept and quite traditional. Brett took some great photos of theplace and surrounds - a couple of traditional houses and meeting halls as wellas the rice fields. There's always an animal or two and this time we cameacross some ducks on the side of the road. It's a very photogenic place. Westopped of at a silversmith shop, which had some lovely traditional filigree workearrings and rings as well as some more modern necklaces etc. We made a coupleof purchases - not complete bargains unfortunately - I'm terrible at it!

Back in the car and the drive became verybeautiful and the traffic not to appalling as we headed down to the lake. Westopped for a photo op at the top of 44 hairpin bends. Our driver negotiatedthem with ease, although you would have to worry about the trucks that had 20passengers

The Lake is large and was very busy withpicnickers, site see-ers and other traffic as we are still on Hari Rayaholidays. The local colour was out and about with groups of boys at the side ofthe road drumming at the passing traffic. Each group had a 'mascot', someonedressed as a monkey and rattled a tin at the cars passing by - I uses it keptthem busy for the day. We stopped at a Lake side padang restaurant for a cooldrink.

We then took the coast road - the weatherwas good, so we settled in for the next three hours to Padang arriving in theafternoon.

Our original hotel turned out to a backpacker place for Mentawi surfers so we went onto the Bumiminang Hotel for thenight.

We had an evening walk and an early nightfor our flight back to Jakarta today.